Ridley Scott’s Alien came out in 1979 and, while it’s a beloved classic, I’d venture to say that there are more Ripley memes on the Internet than there are actual people under 30 who’ve seen the film. So along comes Life, Daniel Espinosa’s space horror film that is part homage, part shameless rip-off. It’s actually a halfway decent simulacrum—better special effects, way less iconic characters—but I’d urge the youth of America to see Alien (and Aliens, for that matter) first before diving in. (That way they’ll be able to play the, “Find the shot stolen directly from the original!” game.)
The plot is awfully familiar. A team of astronauts have extracted a life form off Mars. First the little thing is just an inert speck you can’t see without a microscope—they affectionately call it Calvin. Then it animates, with a little help from biologist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare)—and then it becomes bigger and slimier and more sunction-y and tentacled. Then it gets hungry.
The cast is deeply overqualified. Turns out, in space, people can hear you wisecrack, so Ryan Reynolds is there, doing his Ryan Reynolds thing as a maverick engineer. The lovely and formidable Rebecca Ferguson plays the ship’s disease control specialist. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the ship’s doctor who has been up in space so long he’s not sure he wants to come down. Rounding out the international cast are Hiroyuki Sanada as a Japanese astronaut whose wife just gave birth (he watched on his iPad) and Olga Dihovichnaya as the ship’s commander.
The film is taut and scary; all the spaceship bells and whistles convinced this Luddite, and it contains a couple of the gnarliest death scenes I’ve seen on film in a while. (One human; one rat.) This summer, Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant will be hitting theaters. If nothing else, this one feels like a pretty good palate cleanser.